Wahlberg Talks About Crying While Filming “The Lovely Bones”

Who could have guessed that the story of a fourteen-year-old girl, brutally raped and murdered on her way home from school, would become one of the decade's most beloved tales? "The Lovely Bones," Alice Sebold's renowned novel about Susie Salmon watching over her family, friends, and murderer from "The In-Between" as they grieve and fixate on her, steadily captivated readers and now arrives on the big screen.

For Rachel Weisz, who stars as Abigail Salmon, Susie's grieving mother, Sebold's novel was invaluable. Re-reading the story over and over again, Weisz called those pages "great fuel" for her imagination. However, for her co-star, venturing into the tale was a much darker, scarier prospect. Mark Wahlberg, who took over the role of Susie's father after Ryan Gosling was fired days before filming was set to begin, had tremendous difficulty embarking on the material. It wasn't for lack of preparation, but because of how disturbing the plot was when he thought of something similar happening to one of his three young children.

"Because of the way I approach work, I wasn't all that thrilled about the subject matter," Wahlberg explains. "I don't have the God-given talent Rachel does to just snap into it, have these floods of emotion coming out, and then turn it off. I basically had to live in that head space for the entire time."

Asked if the story had a similar impact on Weisz, also the mother of a small child, she smiles knowingly and shakes her head. "As an actor, you have to imagine all sorts of things. You imagine beautiful things, you imagine ugly things; that's my job."

The actress reveals that she rarely finds material too dark or problematic to venture into, largely because she knows how to yank herself out at the end of the day. "I immerse myself in something, but I've learned how to come out of it. I can't go home to my kids in a state of despair and tears, " she laughs. "It's a skill you learn, like one might learn to juggle. You learn to turn things on and off."

"I'm still learning to juggle," Wahlberg shrugs sheepishly. "I would go home and grab my daughter and hold her. And I would start crying. She'd be like ‘Daddy, what's wrong with you?’ She just wanted to play."
 

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